


And We Wait

by INMH



Series: hc_bingo Fanfiction Fills 2016 [19]
Category: Fright Night (2011)
Genre: Drama, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pneumonia, Strong Language, Suspense, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-11 17:50:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9000616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/INMH/pseuds/INMH
Summary: Charley comes home from school early, and Jerry is waiting.





	

Amy is the best girlfriend in the world.  
  
When the nurse declares that he has a temperature of one-hundred degrees and Charley can’t reach his mom on the phone, she drives him home at lunch.  
  
“This is what you get,” She lectures good-naturedly, “When you rush back to school and do too much after getting sick.”  
  
“I thought I was better,” Charley rasps, throat and chest burning with the air that came in and out. It doesn’t help that it’s cold and cloudy today; the cool air seems to aggravate his lungs even more. “And I didn’t think I was doing too much.”  
  
Okay, so that might not be 100% true. He’d missed four days of school last week and he’d been frantic to make up all that work given that his teachers had only given very small extensions for the assignments. Maybe he hadn’t gotten as much sleep as would have been smart for someone recovering from an illness.  
  
Well, he’ll have to be sure not to make that mistake this time.  
  
Amy pulls into the driveway, then leans in and kisses him on the forehead. “Are you going to be okay?”  
  
And Charley nods, because Amy has about fifteen minutes left to make it back to school before lunch is over and it’s probably going to come down to the wire. “Yeah, I’m fine. You go ahead.”  
  
Amy gives a sympathetic little pout. “Feel better, Charley.” She gives him another light kiss on the forehead before he climbs out of the car. Charley waits until she’s rounded the corner and driven out of sight before he starts digging through his pockets for his house keys.  
  
When he can’t find them, Charley abruptly drops down to his knees to search through his backpack. It’s a mistake he’s not going to make a second time: The sudden movement makes his vision swim, and he breaks out into a violent coughing fit that doubles him over. It’s not normal coughing, either: It’s deep, ugly, painful hacking that makes his head and heart pound disturbingly hard.  
  
When it’s over and he can bring a bit of air in normally again, Charley stays still for a moment, trying to fight the alarming feeling that he might be about to pass out.  
  
“Hey, guy.”  
  
Charley looks to his right. Jerry’s got a bag of trash slung over his shoulder, head cocked to the side as he studies Charley. “Hey.” That one syllable makes his chest ache.  
  
“You alright?”  
  
Charley shakes his head. “Sick.”  
  
“Huh.” Jerry hesitates, but then sets the bag down and crosses over into Charley’s yard. So much for Ed’s theory about him being a vampire; it’s a little past noon at this point. Bit too early for the vampires to be out and about.  
  
“What’re you-” Charley pauses to take in more air, every word making him more breathless than they should. “-doing up? Thought you- worked at night.”  
  
Jerry flashes him a smile. “Had a dentist appointment. And unfortunately, the offices around here don’t have midnight openings.” He holds out a hand and Charley takes it, allows Jerry to pull him up (and he’s apparently really strong, strong enough to lift a decently-sized teenage boy off the ground with no effort whatsoever, not even a grunt, which might have been odd if he wasn’t a construction worker and Charley’s brain wasn’t currently dying a slow oxygen-deprived death-)  
  
Charley breaks into another coughing fit. He sways unsteadily as his vision goes spotty again, and for a really scary minute he thinks that he might actually be about to pass out in the middle of the driveway. Jerry steadies him with a hand on his shoulder, and it’s all Charley can do not to give in to his shaking legs and collapse onto the pavement.  
  
When the fit is done and Charley is content that he’s not going to immediately pass out, he croaks, “Thanks,” and then cautiously leans down to grab his bag.  
  
Jerry considers him for a moment. Then he says, “Want to come over to my place?”  
  
Between the Herculanean effort of picking up his bag and his body’s utter misery, Charley isn’t sure he’s heard that correctly. “Huh?”  
  
“I mean, no offense, and I’m not trying to be creepy or anything, but you look like crap. It kinda makes me nervous, you being alone for the rest of the day when you’re, uh… Well, you’re breathing kinda funny.”  
  
He’s not wrong. Every breath Charley takes in makes him feel like one of those fire-breather guys at the circus, like there’s flames licking mercilessly at the delicate tissue of his lungs. It’s actually gotten to the point where he’s a little light-headed, probably because he’s not getting the kind of oxygen necessary to keep himself up and moving and talking.  
  
It occurs to him that if something goes wrong, if Charlie passes out and hits his head or- shit- stops breathing or something, his mom’s not going to be home until late and there’s no one else to check in on him. Amy might text later to see how he’s doing, but if he doesn’t respond, she’ll probably just assume that he’s asleep.  
  
That scares him, and he feels so shitty, and Charley just doesn’t have it in him to be suspicious of the guy Ed’s accused of being a vampire, not with the alternatives being as crappy as they are.  
  
“Yeah… Okay. Thanks, Jerry.”  
  
“No problem, kid.”  
  
[---]  
  
There is a general rule amongst vampires:  
  
Don’t bite sick people.  
  
At best, it’ll taste awful.  
  
At worst, it’ll be like a really bad acid trip.  
  
From the way Charley smells right now, Jerry’s hedging his bets on the idea that it’d be a mix between the two.  
  
Vampires are predators, and most predators- immortal or not, apparently- have some sort of instinct that says ‘stay away from the things that smell, sound, or look like they’ll make you sick’.  
  
Oh well. He had a decent feed last night and plans to have another tonight, so as much as it kills him to let an easy feed go untouched, he will.  
  
If there’s anything he’s learned over the last four-hundred years, it’s that patience has its rewards.  
  
[---]  
  
The moment Charley sits down on the chair, whatever strength remains to him evaporates into thin air.  
  
He feels so physically weak, he marvels at the fact that he was up and walking around just a few minutes ago, that he was at school less than an hour ago trying to push his way through an English test. He’s so out of it, it almost feels as though he’s never felt anything _but_ this.  
  
“This just come on today? I thought you looked a bit pale when I met you, but I saw you on my way to work last night,” Jerry remarks as he paws through his freezer for ice. “and I thought maybe that was just how you looked.”  
  
It takes Charley’s sluggish brain a moment to catch up. “Saw me…?”  
  
“Yeah, little ways from here. You were with this other kid, lives on the next street over- Ed-something, yeah?”  
  
“Evil Ed,” Charley mumbles. His eyes slip shut, but he forces them open again. It’s a losing battle that he’s fighting; he feels that bone-deep fatigue that one feels when they’re sick, or they’ve gone more than twenty-four hours without sleep.  
  
“That’s a bit harsh,” Jerry chuckles. He walks over with a large glass of ice water in hand, sets it down on the table (it’s more like a box, really, and Charley’s too far gone right now to figure out whether it’s meant for something more utilitarian or if Jerry just has really weird taste in furniture).  
  
“Nickname.”  
  
“Ah.”  
  
“He said you were a vampire,” Charley mumbles without thinking. He’s so damn tired, he wants to slide down in the chair a little bit and let his head rest on the cushion but knows it’ll only make him cough harder.  
  
But Jerry laughs, unfazed. “Y’know, that’s actually not the first time someone’s accused me of being a vampire? I’m not generally out during the daytime hours. Nighttime construction can be a real bitch sometimes.” He pauses, eyes darting over Charley. “Hey, you don’t have a fever, do you?”  
  
“Yeah.”  
  
“Crap. Let me run upstairs and see if I can’t find some ibuprofen or something. Don’t need your brain baking itself to death on my watch.”  
  
“Too late,” Charley croaks after him as he disappears. Fighting the urge to pass out, he moves the only part of his body that still has anything resembling energy: His eyes.  
  
Jerry’s place doesn’t scream ‘vampire’, really- no bats hanging from the ceiling, no coffins, no bloodstains on the-  
  
Wait-  
  
No. Not a bloodstain. It’s a splatter of white paint that Charley’s brain re-colored into red for a few seconds because it’s dying a slow heat-death trapped in his skull, which suddenly feels _way_ too small to be holding it.  
  
Point is, this doesn’t look like a vampire’s den: It looks like the house of a bachelor who doesn’t plan on changing his status anytime soon.  
  
Jerry’s beside him suddenly, having come into the room so quickly and quietly that Charley didn’t even notice. “Well, it looks like I don’t have anything with me.” Jerry chews his thumb a little. “It’d only take me twenty minutes or so run to the store and get some. You think you’d be okay if I did?”  
  
“You don’t have to do that,” Charley protests. The guy worked last night, he’s probably exhausted, and Charley’s feeling more than a little guilt at being associated with Ed’s paranoid little mission and accusations last night.  
  
“It’s no problem, guy.” Jerry claps him gently on the shoulder. “Like I said, it’d be pretty bad if your brain cooked itself to death on my watch, right?”  
  
Charley nods hazily, the words melting together into a meaningless mush.  
  
“Alright then. I’ll be back.”  
  
[---]  
  
Well, this has been more enlightening than Jerry thought it would be.  
  
He knows what Ed told Charley- he’d heard the entire conversation without ever stepping foot into Adam’s house, even though he easily could have.  
  
Still, he hadn’t known whether or not Charley believed it, and now it’s pretty apparent that he doesn’t.  
  
That’ll make this _loads_ easier.  
  
**_thmp._**  
  
Jerry freezes, hand on the doorknob.  
  
During his pretend-search for medication (what the hell would he need it for, vampires almost never get sick) he’d quietly dropped into the basement to check on Ed. It didn’t escape him that Ed could probably smell his old friend right now.  
  
“Don’t do anything stupid, Ed,” He’d cooed, letting his eyes go black and his smile become toothy. “Don’t do anything that I’ll make you regret.”  
  
Ed had shrunk away, nodding.  
  
_Don’t do anything stupid, Ed,_ Jerry thinks once more.  
  
_You really don’t want to see me mad._  
  
[---]  
  
At some point, Charley drifts off.  
  
It’s not so much that he has fever-dreams so much as fever-flashes: Weird, murky, incoherent images fade in and out, and he’ll likely only remember pieces of what he’s seeing later when he’s awake.  
  
There’s a constant under-layer of discomfort, a constant sense of ‘too hot’ and ‘aching’ and ‘breathless’. It keeps him closer to the world of the waking than he would like, but there’s nothing he can do about it right now.  
  
At one point, he dreams of Jerry’s living room. It’s dark, the tinted windows keeping any possible sunlight out of the house. It looks way more menacing than it had when Charley had come in earlier, and he has a strange, terrible sense of impending danger.  
  
And suddenly, Ed is standing before him.  
  
“Hey _Char-ley_ ,” He sneers.  
  
This is wrong.  
  
Ed is too pale.  
  
His eyes are black.  
  
His teeth are poking out from below his lip.  
  
His nails are long and sharp.  
  
_What?_  
  
Charley can’t speak. He can’t even see straight.  
  
“How you doing, _friend?_ ”  
  
Charley’s eyes fall shut, then open; shut, then open.  
  
_What?_  
  
Suddenly, Ed’s face is right in front of his own.  
  
And he can’t breathe.  
  
“You let him get me, Charley,” Ed hisses. “You laughed at me, and then you let him get me.”  
  
Pressure around his already damaged throat.  
  
Spots swim across his vision.  
  
“Fuck you, Charley.”  
  
Everything’s getting dark.  
  
“You don’t deserve to be turned.”  
  
Darkness.  
  
[---]  
  
Of-fucking-course.  
  
Jerry rips Ed off Charley and barely, _barely_ restrains himself from throwing the idiot into the nearest wall. He can make excuses for what Charley saw, but explaining away a man-sized hole in the wall will be harder.  
  
At least Ed has the decency to look completely fucking terrified. He has a lot to learn about vampire etiquette, which more or less boils down to ‘if I catch it, it’s _mine_ ’.  
  
“Basement,” Jerry hisses, and he knows his eyes are black and his teeth have grown to poke out from behind his lips. “Right. Now.”  
  
Well, thank God Ed had waited a good long while to come crawling out of the basement. If he’d pulled this crap any sooner, dear old Charley would be dead.  
  
The kid’s breathing is sharp and raspy, gasping for air, and his eyes are fluttering as he fights his way back to consciousness. Now Jerry has to do damage control and hope for the best because his dumbass fledgling had to lose his temper.  
  
“Whoa, whoa,” Jerry says, paternalistic tone and nature sliding into place as easy as you please. “Buddy, calm down. What on earth were you dreaming about, kid? You were choking yourself in your sleep.”  
  
Bless him, Charley is so oxygen-deprived and feverish that he can barely string a sentence together.  
  
“Wh- Wh-?” He looks confused, and Jerry can smell the fever, the heightened body temperature as easily as he can smell the fear in his sluggishly-pounding heart. “I c… I can’t…”  
  
Jerry affects a worried look; only a small percentage of it is genuine, and largely because it wouldn’t do to have his teenage neighbor die in his house (yet). “You’re not looking so good. You might need to see a doctor- What’s your mom’s phone number? I’ll see if I can’t call her for you.”  
  
[---]  
  
When Charley comes to next, the car window is cool against his forehead and his mother’s voice is a soothing, natural background noise to his pounding head.  
  
“Thank you, thank you so much-”  
  
“It’s really no problem, it’s not like I could leave the kid out in the cold- so to speak.”  
  
“Just- thank you, Jerry, thank you.”  
  
“It’s no problem, Jane. Any time.”  
  
The car door opens, then shuts, and Charley feels a hand pushing back his hair.  
  
“It’s okay, honey, I’m taking you to the hospital.”  
  
Charley doesn’t open his eyes, barely twitches to acknowledge his mother’s words, and nods off again as the car starts.  
  
[---]  
  
Jerry watches Jane and Charley drive off, and smirks a little.  
  
Well, that’s over and done with.  
  
Time to go hunting.  
  
-End


End file.
